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John Carlos Baez

John Carlos Baez (b. 1961) is an American mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside. He is known for his work on spin foams in loop quantum gravity. More recently, his research has focused on applications of higher categories to physics.

Baez is known to science fans as the author of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, an irregular column on the web featuring mathematical exposition and criticism. Baez started This Week's Finds in 1993 for the Usenet community, and it now has a worldwide following. This Week's Finds anticipated the concept of a personal weblog.[citation needed] Baez is also known on the World Wide Web as the author of an ironic crackpot index.

Baez earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics at Princeton University in 1982. He earned his Ph.D. at MIT in 1986, under the direction of Irving Segal. In one of his posts, Baez mentioned that he can trace his "mathematical genealogy" back to the famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss; the Mathematics Genealogy Project lists over 35,000 fellow scientists with whom Baez shares this lineage. Baez's lineage also includes other mathematical luminaries such as Weierstrass and Riesz. See the link to the Mathematics Genealogy Project below for details.